Tom Turner was born in Port Carbon, PA, the youngest
of three children of Mr. and Mrs. Frank and Ada Turner. The family moved
to Bloomsburg in 1894 where his father began work as a book-keeper. But
tragedy struck the family early, when Tom's mother died in 1897 at the age of
40, and his father caught pneumonia and passed away at 49 in 1901. Tom was
then supported by his uncle, Charles W. Miller, who was a trustee of the Bloomsburg State Normal School.
Miller paid Tom's way through school, and he graduated from the College Preparatory
Program on June 27, 1906, having begun
his studies in September of 1903. He then went on to earn an engineering degree
(an AB in Geology) from
Leland Stanford University in California, from which he officially graduated in
May of 1914. Before then in 1913 Tom already had a well-paying job
working for a mining company in eastern Siberia. He was there when the
First World War broke out, but was forced to leave after the Bolshevik
revolution began. He went first to San Francisco, and then to Alaska where
he continued work as a mining engineer.

Turner joined the army, and hoped to get back to
Siberia with the American troops fighting the Communists. But before going
there he boarded the Canadian-Pacific steamship Princess Sophia at Skagway,
Alaska on October 23, 1918, bound for Vancouver, British Columbia. The
next day a storm came up and the ship ran aground on a reef. When the
weather turned calm it was decided not to remove the passengers, with hopes the
high tide could move it off the reef. But a second storm hit on Friday the
25th, which lifted the steamship across the reef and to the bottom of the
sound. The loss of life was terrible, with 268 passengers and 75 crew
members dead, along with over $1,000,000 in gold.

Tom Turner's uncle in Bloomsburg, Sherman F. Peacock, was
told the tragic news by Tom's brother Warren, who was working as an aide to the
commandant of the San Francisco Navy Yard. Another intelligent,
well-educated young man was lost, and he never had a chance to serve his
country. But his story was not quite over, because in July of 1919 his
body was found when divers worked to raise the steamship, no doubt to recover
the gold. Tom made one final trip back to Bloomsburg, where he was buried
on November 8, 1922 in Old Rosemont Cemetery on the
hillside overlooking the town, next to the parents he had lost many years
before.